by John Beckman
25. “caricature”: Ibid., 82.
26. “there is laughter, color”: Ibid., 81.
27. “race toward whiteness”: Langston Hughes, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 2nd ed., ed. Vincent P. Leitch (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010), 1196. Originally appeared in The Nation, June 23, 1926.
28. “money to spend”: Hughes, The Big Sea, 39.
29. “Fun!”: Ibid., 62.
30. “Let the blare of Negro jazz bands”: Hughes, “Negro Artist,” 1196.
31. “Harlem Negroes, once their aversion”: “Fire Burns: A Department of Comment,” Fire!! 1, no 1 (November 1926): 47.
32. “debauched tenth”: David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. DuBois, 1919–1963: The Fight for Equality and the American Century (New York: Henry Holt, 2001), 176. In 1928, Nella Larsen and Claude McKay released their debut novels, and DuBois yoked them together in a single review: he lauded Larsen’s Quicksand as “the best piece of fiction that Negro America has produced since the heyday of Chesnutt” and said McKay’s Home to Harlem “nauseate[d]” him and that “the dirtier parts of its filth” made him feel “distinctly like taking a bath” (W. E. B. DuBois, “Two Novels,” The Crisis, June 1928). These novels, when juxtaposed, also illustrate Harlem’s class-driven ambivalence over Jazz Age fun. DuBois admired Larsen’s protagonist Helga Crane for her “whimsical, unsatisfied soul,” the tragic feature that prevents this mixed-race nomad from joining any of her possible communities, black, white, highbrow, lowbrow, or high-society Danish. Accordingly, in a key scene in a Harlem cabaret, she briefly joins the dancing throng and is “drugged, lifted, sustained by the extraordinary music, blown out, ripped out, beaten out, by the joyous, wild, murky orchestra” and is ultimately repulsed by what she considers the “fantastic motley of ugliness and beauty, semi-barbaric, sophisticated, exotic.” She tries to reduce Harlem fun to primitivism, but what she describes is the welter of modern America, spun by the body-racking pleasures of jazz. DuBois accused McKay of “us[ing] every art and emphasis to paint drunkenness, fighting, lascivious sexual promiscuity and utter absence of restraint in as bold and as bright colors as he can.” McKay’s working-class protagonist, Jake, about whom even DuBois found “something appealing,” is the portrait of a hedonist—he deserts the army (because he sees no action in the war) and returns home to “Good old Harlem! Chocolate Harlem! Sweet Harlem!” where he loses himself in its “sugared laughter” and “contagious fever”—but he is no flashy caricature like the Scarlet Creeper in Nigger Heaven. He brings a poet’s light sensibility to Harlem’s pool halls, brothels, and cabarets and is most at home in the Congo, “an amusement place entirely for the unwashed of the Black Belt,” where “smells lingered telling the nature of their occupation. Pot-wrestlers, W.C. attendants, scrub maids, dish-washers, stevedores.… The Congo was African in spirit and in color. No white persons were admitted there.” Home to Harlem (1928; Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1987), 7, 14, 15, 29–30. But McKay seems uninterested in offending readers like DuBois. He is showing Jake’s intimacy with the fragrant crowd and his love of the dancers’ sweaty “hot soup” (32). But of course such candor was in itself a kind of joyous revolt.
33. “adorable”: “Mae Sullivan,” interview with Mae Sullivan, at her home in Washington, D.C., April 19, 1977, page 3. Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the New York Public Library. David Levering Lewis “Voices from the Renaissance Collection,” MG 335, Box 1, Folder 2.
34. “miss something”: Hughes, The Big Sea, 47.
35. “must be smelt”: Ibid., 71.
36. “to shake hands”: Ibid., 81.
37. “not fun”: Ibid., 83.
38. “gaily mutinous state”: Ibid., 111.
39. “hunched over”: Ibid., 250.
40. “grandiloquently about democracy”: Ibid., 255.
41. “Jim Crow policy”: Ibid., 224–25.
42. “more amusing than any night club”: Ibid., 229.
43. “the tom-tom of revolt”: Hughes, “Negro Artist,” 1195.
44. “marked the height”: Arnold Rampersad, “Hughes’s Fine Clothes to the Jew,” in Langston Hughes: Critical Perspectives Past and Present, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and K. A. Appiah (New York: Amistad Press, 1993), 53. Rampersad suggests that Van Vechten, who read through the volume before sending it on to Knopf, and to whom it is dedicated, may have suggested the title Fine Clothes to the Jew, with which Knopf (Jewish himself) took issue until persuaded by Van Vechten to keep it. As Rampersad also points out, Knopf did not take issue with Van Vechten’s own controversial title, Nigger Heaven. The title comes from the poem Hard Luck: “When hard luck overtakes you / Nothin’ for you to do. / Gather up yo’ fine clothes / An’ sell ’em to de Jew. // Jew takes yo’ fine clothes, / Gives you a dollar an’ a half.… Go to de bootleg’s, / Git some gin to make you laugh” (Collected Poems, 82). In The Big Sea Hughes himself voices regret over it.
45. “piffling trash”: James A. Emanuel, Langston Hughes (New York: Twayne, 1967), 31–32.
46. “Laughers”: Langston Hughes, The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, ed. Arnold Rampersad (New York: Vintage, 1995), 112, 114. “Laughers” shines in this somber volume. It parades Jessie Fauset’s “gift of laughter” that “has its rise in the very woes that beset us.” Its refrain—“Loud-mouthed laughers in the hands / Of Fate”—considers both the peoples’ hazards and the gaiety with which they brave their dangers. And if its frowning question, “Laughers?,” gives voice to Hughes’s critics, then its exclamations (“What dancers!” “What singers!”) put those critics in their place.
47. “Jazz Band in a Parisian Cabaret”: Ibid., 60.
48. “Zelda just wasn’t afraid of anything”: Nancy Milford, Zelda: A Biography (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), 16–17.
49. “ten boys”: Ibid., 44.
50. “gets stewed in public”: Ibid., 60.
51. That month they chaperoned a party: Kendall Taylor, Sometimes Madness Is Wisdom: Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald (New York: Ballantine, 2001), 68.
52. white-supremacist Scott: “I believe at last in the white man’s burden,” he wrote to Edmund Wilson in 1921. “We are as far above the modern Frenchman as he is above the Negro.” The Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald, ed. Andrew Turnbull (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1963), 326.
53. “was nasty,” “drunk,” “was an original”: Van Vechten as quoted in Milford, Zelda, 98–99.
54. “The flapper springs full-grown”: Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, “What Became of the Flappers?” McCall’s, October 1925, reprinted in The Collected Writings of Zelda Fitzgerald, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1991), 397–99.
55. “Flapper Styles Will Prevail!”: Cover text, The Flapper, October 1922. Fitzgerald calls 1922 “the peak of the younger generation” in “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” 15.
56. “Eulogy on the Flapper”: Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, “Eulogy on the Flapper,” Metropolitan Magazine, June 1922, reprinted in Collected Writings of Zelda Fitzgerald, 391–93.
57. “the quintessence of what the term”: Stenn, Clara Bow: Runnin’ Wild, 87.
58. “the unrivaled embodiment of sex appeal”: Elizabeth Atkins quoted in Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Letters from the Front, vol. 3, No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 63.
59. “liv[ing] in that gay poverty”: Floyd Dell, Love in Greenwich Village (1926; North Stratford, NH: Ayer Publishing, 1970), 33.
60. “jazzing music”: Edna St. Vincent Millay, Second April (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1921), 88.
61. “My candle burns at both ends”: Edna St. Vincent Millay, Collected Poems, ed. Norma Millay (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1945), 127.
62. “And if I loved you Wednesday”: Ibid., 129.
63. “I’ve been a wicked girl,” “I see with single eye”: Edna St. Vincent Millay, The Harp-Weaver and Other
Poems (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1923), 55.
64. “will never make you a hatband”: “Flapping Not Repented Of,” New York Times, July 16, 1922, reprinted in Mowry, The Twenties, 173.
65. “The tittle-tattle of ingénues’ luncheons”: Warner Fabian, Flaming Youth (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1923), 129.
66. racks her wanton frame: At times her persona’s wayward id rages like a house party:
Heart, have no pity on this house of bone:
Shake it with dancing, break it down with joy.
At others, she welcomes it like death:
Sweet love, sweet thorn, when lightly to my heart
I took your thrust, whereby since I am slain.
At others it jails her like a drug addiction:
Shall I be prisoner till my pulses stop
To hateful Love and drag his noisy chain.
Millay, Collected Poems, 658, 646, 647.
67. “An American Art Student”: Quoted in Gilbert and Gubar, Letters from the Front, vol. 3, 76–78. Millay rewrote the romantic script to the female party’s advantage. Gilbert and Gubar note her manipulation of the “femme fatale/flapper” persona, how she uses it “to expose the artifice and absurdity of romance” while at the same time flipping “conventional love scenes” to make them “fatal to male rather than female lovers.”
68. to drink as much: For an excellent account of “New Women” and drink, see Lerner, Dry Manhattan, 171–98.
69. were regularly tempered: Paula S. Fass, The Damned and the Beautiful: American Youth in the 1920s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 262–65.
70. “Any girl I catch smoking anywhere”: Ibid., 299.
71. “torches of freedom”: Burton St. John, Press Professionalism and Propaganda: The Rise of Journalistic Double-Mindedness, 1917–1941 (Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2010), 30.
72. “A Flapper’s Dictionary”: The Flapper, July 1922, cited in Jim Lewin, Book Flaps (blog) at bookflaps.blogspot.com, April 10, 2011; accessed August 25, 2012.
73. “Her girlish ways”: Dorothy Parker, Not Much Fun: The Lost Poems of Dorothy Parker, ed. Stuart Y. Silverstein (New York: Scribner, 1996), 105.
74. “wholesome, engaging, uncorseted”: Stuart Y. Silverstein, “Introduction,” in Parker, Not Much Fun, 35.
75. “Not much fun”: Ibid., 23.
76. she was the life of the party: It seems Parker only had a taste for the wilder variety of party. As is evident from her “Hymn of Hate” called “Parties,” her festive nature was hard to please, hating “clean, home games” like “guess[ing] the number of seeds in a cucumber,” hating days in the country with their dozens of hard-boiled eggs, and above all hating the “informal little Dinner Party,” which she considered “the lowest form of taking nourishment.” Parker, Not Much Fun, 219–21.
77. “You can lead a horticulture”: Silverstein, “Introduction,” 27n.
78. “There was a little girl”: Ibid., 14n.
79. “all the earmarks of masterpiece”: W. Somerset Maugham, “Variations on a Theme,” in Dorothy Parker, The Portable Dorothy Parker (New York: Viking, 1954), 601.
80. “send me a saw”: Parker, Not Much Fun, 29.
81. “the quick excitement”: Parker, Portable Dorothy Parker, 293.
82. “by the time she was a teenager”: Lillian Schlissel, “Introduction,” in Three Plays by Mae West (New York: Routledge, 1997), 3.
83. “wildly uninhibited antics”: George Eels and Stanley Musgrove, Mae West (New York: William Morrow, 1982), 34.
84. “make a better wife and mother”: Mae West, Sex, in Three Plays, 74.
85. “shimmy shawabble”: Schlissel, “Introduction,” 10.
86. “vulgar”: Reviews cited ibid.
87. “degenerate”: Mae West, The Drag, in Three Plays, 107.
88. “happier”: Ibid., 102.
89. “born homosexual”: Ibid., 108.
90. “people like that”: Ibid., 107.
91. “they like me”: Ibid., 118.
92. “It must be the wagon”: Ibid., 133–34.
93. “a restraining order”: Schlissel, “Introduction,” 15.
94. “Let’s see some other son of a bitch do that”: Ibid., 23.
9 ZOOT SUIT RIOTS
1. “a whole race”: This and subsequent quotations in this paragraph are from F. Scott Fitzgerald, “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” in The Crack Up, ed. Edmund Wilson (1931; New York: New Directions, 1945), 15, 20, 19, 18. The Complete Works of Scott Fitzgerald (who said he coined the term “Jazz Age”) reads like a saga of 1920s fun. The stories get woollier as they go: from the early stories and wisecracking first novel that taught young Americans how to read their own antics; to the glamorous recasting of his and Zelda’s bad behavior in The Beautiful and Damned; to his 1925 masterpiece whose antihero observes his own wild parties with a forlorn sense of disengagement; to Fitzgerald’s later period of failed recovery, when the zest of his youth has a foul aftertaste—the period of “Babylon Revisited” and Tender Is the Night, in which dashing Dick Diver, a figure of worldly merriment, fails three times at a waterskiing stunt and seals his fate as a post-fun grotesque. A master of self-aggrandizement, Fitzgerald projected his trials and triumphs onto an entire era. He had his fun—had it more glamorously and vigorously than most—and in the final analysis he didn’t recommend it.
2. “exciting story millions lost in an hour”: Crosby, Shadows of the Sun, 284.
3. “only one and a half million people”: John Kenneth Galbraith, The Great Crash, 1929 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1954), 78.
4. “decorated them with pretty girls”: Fan-dancer Sally Rand quoted in Studs Terkel, Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression (1970; New York: New Press, 2005), 170.
5. “as hot an issue as Hitler”: Cited in Marybeth Hamilton, “Goodness Had Nothing to Do with It: Censoring Mae West,” in Movie Censorship and American Culture, 2nd ed., ed. Francis J. Couvares (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996), 187.
6. “West’s acting style”: Ibid., 193.
7. “young Negro high-school girl”: This and subsequent quotations from Henry James Forman, Our Movie-Made Children (New York: Macmillan, 1933), 141, 143–45, 147.
8. “The very man who will guffaw”: The Hays Office’s Ray Norr quoted in Hamilton, “Goodness Had Nothing to Do with It,” 202.
9. “humanity crusading in the pursuit of happiness”: Modern Times, dir. and prod. Charles Chaplin, Charles Chaplin Productions, USA, 1936.
10. “the terrific kick”: Zora Neale Hurston, “To Lawrence Jordan,” February 18, 1927, The Zora Neale Hurston Collection, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library, Zora Neale Hurston Collection, MG 130, Box 1, one of three unnumbered folders. Until they broke up over a plagiarism rhubarb, Hughes and Hurston were the life of a Harlem Renaissance party whose fun, as they knew, was based on conflict. As Wallace Thurman depicts them in his roman à clef, Infants of the Spring (1932), Langston Hughes is the “mischievous boy” Tony Crews and Zora Neale Hurston is Sweetie May Carr, “noted for her ribald wit.” When Dr. Parkes (Alain Locke) hosts a salon for Harlem’s brightest writers, Tony and Sweetie May—unlike the morose DeWitt Clinton (Countee Cullen) and the testy Cedric Williams (Claude McKay)—contribute only winks and giggles. Sweetie interrupts a race debate to boast, “I can do the Charleston better than any white person.” And when the evening bursts into an intellectual brawl over Marx, DuBois, and “the Negro Problem,” Tony and Sweetie May trade “original verses to the St. James Infirmary.” Wallace Thurman, Infants of the Spring (New York: Random House, 1999), 141–43, 149, 151.
11. “Queen of the Niggerati”: Robert F. Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977), 44.
12. “a city,” as she characterized it: Zora Neale Hurston, Mules and Men (New York: HarperPerennial, 1990), 20.
13. “too much spirit,” “jump at de sun,” “God, Devil, Brer Rabbit”: Zora Neale Hur
ston, Dust Tracks on a Road: An Autobiography, 2nd ed., ed. Robert E. Hemenway (1942; Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984), 63–64.
14. “most amusing”: Hughes, The Big Sea, 238–39.
15. “feather-bed of resistance”: Hurston, Mules and Men, 3.
16. “carefully accented Barnardese”: Hurston, Dust Tracks, 175.
17. “poets of the swinging blade”: Ibid., 179.
18. “singing, laughing, cursing”: Ibid., 180.
19. “balling”: Zora Neale Hurston, “Glossary of Harlem Slang,” http://aalbc.com/authors/harlemslang.htm. Accessed July 17, 2013.
20. “Dancing the square dance,” “risky pleasure”: Hurston, Dust Tracks, 182.
21. “emotional strength”: Clarence Major, Juba to Jive: A Dictionary of African-American Slang (New York: Viking, 1994), 138. In his superlative The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), Henry Louis Gates Jr. speculates that the word “dozens” “quite probably derives from an eighteenth-century meaning of the verb dozen, ‘to stun, stupefy, daze,’ in the black sense, through language” (71). It also belongs under the rubric of “Signifying,” the variety of wordplay and verbal competition (a sort of “making fun”—though not fun of—through language [68]) that Gates believes should be part of standard home curriculum in the education of young African Americans—a social skill and rite of passage that children and adolescents learn from their parents: “Teaching one’s children the fine art of Signifyin(g) is to teach them about this mode of linguistic circumnavigation, to teach them a second language they can share with other black people” (76).
22. “If you have no faith”: Hurston, Dust Tracks, 187.
23. “contest[s] in hyperbole”: Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (New York: Perennial Library, 1990), 59.
24. “the thing that Saul’s daughter had done”: Ibid., 75.
25. “permanent transients with no attachments”: Ibid., 125.
26. “the Lindy off the ground”: Stearns and Stearns, Jazz Dance, 324–27.